For decades, the public has associated the brand IHOP with pancakes, so much that it’s almost hardwired, according to Ira Kalb, assistant professor of clinical marketing for the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business.

“When you’ve built those pathways in the brain, it’s so hard to change,” he said in a phone interview.

Nevertheless, he thought the move might have a big payoff for IHOP.

“I think if it’s a temporary change, that would make it a brilliant move. If it’s a permanent change, that’s a stupid move.”

IHOP publicizes its burger promotion with a star on the sidewalk in front of its restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. (Fielding Buck, staff)

Domino’s says it is “saving pizza, one pothole at a time”
with its Paving for Pizza campaign. (PRNewsfoto/Domino’s Pizza)

IHOP deliberately went big and bold on this campaign, something social media experts say long-established chains need to do to be relevant in social media.

IHOP’s move was one of last week’s biggest headline grabbers from the marketing world, but it wasn’t the only foray into weirdness.

Domino’s Pizza has sent construction crews to places like Burbank and Milford, Delaware, to fix roads so that potholes won’t slow pizza delivery. The campaign is called Paving for Pizzas, and calls on people to nominate their towns for repair grants. A few weeks earlier, the company offered a carryout insurance policy on its pizza.

KFC Canada is marking Father’s Day by offering a “Bucket Björn” online. A Babybjörn is a strap-on baby carrier that allows the infant to be near a parent’s heartbeat. KFC’s Björn keeps deep-fried food close to dad’s heart, with a sauce pocket and napkin dispenser thrown in. Customers can look for it for $50 at Colonel & Co., a merchandise website, but it’s marked sold out.

Doritos is pitching the chance to adopt a “dinosaur-sized” tortilla chip in an eBay auction at JurassicDoritos.com that ends June 21. The campaign is a fundraiser for the American Red Cross and volcano relief and ties into the June 22 release of the film “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.”

Such campaigns some straight out of the Nike playbook, according to Kalb. They are designed to generate buzz on social media, which translates to coverage by news media, resulting in free advertising.

That’s the way it played out for IHOP, which started teasing its IHOb campaign on social media days before formally announcing it Monday. It got a huge traffic bump on Twitter.

IHOP’s Twitter following is about a third of what it was five years ago, according to marketing veteran Eric Yaverbaum, whose clients have included such companies as Domino’s and Subway.

“It’s not a bad publicity stunt. As far as hype goes and buzz goes, that part of the equation worked,” said in a phone interview from New York. “The more important part of the equation in marketing always is not what we do in the short term, though we get more people talking about us on Twitter … But is it the right kind of buzz, and more importantly is it the kind of buzz that impact their cash register?

“Personally I find it a little bit confusing,” he added. “I’m probably in good company.”

The name change may have distracted people from the burger menu, although IHOP president Darren Rebelez and other executives explained on Monday that the change was only made at one restaurant, on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, and in a Twitter handle.

It’s a way of getting people to think about IHOP serving lunch and dinner as well as breakfast.

Michelle Leslie, assistant director of digital marketing at Chapman University, thought the campaign did a good job of reaching a younger audience for IHOP, with even negative comments stirring up conversation in the digital world.

“It is extremely difficult to break through the endless feed of content and catch the consumers’ eye, but IHOP was able to just that by disrupting the familiarity people have with their reliable diner,” she wrote in an email. “It is unlikely they would have been able to garner so much attention with a traditional marketing campaign focusing on their food items.”

But if the campaign doesn’t work, it will be easy to walk back, according to Kalb, or as Yaverbaum said, “retract and retrench.”

It could take as long as a year to know if the campaign increases sales, Yaverbaum said.

IHOP says it will flip the “P” in its name to make it IHOb. (Fielding Buck, staff)

One of the problems with name changes is that they affect logos. That is true for IHOP, whose four letters is the logo. The logo has a red curve under the “O” and “P,” creating a smiley face with the letters as eyes. With a lowercase “b,” the letters don’t line up in the same way and the image doesn’t work, Kalb said.

There are few good reasons for a company to change a name, Kalb said, the main one being when a company’s brand becomes too damaged to carry on. He said that happened with an airline named ValuJet transferred its fleet to AirTran in the 1990s after a Florida Everglades crash killed 110 people.

Marketing campaigns work when they combine short-term results with a long-term strategy, Yaverbaum said.

“One thing that you don’t want to do is erode the base that you currently have.”

Fielding Buck has been a business reporter since 2014 with a focus on logistics, supply chain and GIS. Prior experience includes extensive entertainment reporting. He loves photography and dogs and lives in San Bernardino County.